Content

Keyword research is something that should be heavily considered during your website’s creation and during any subsequent search engine optimisation work. Keyword research is the process of finding the optimal keywords that you should be targeting to gain the most quality traffic. Quality traffic can be defined as “an audience that needs little to no work to convert”. Converting quality traffic to sales is a lot easier if you have an audience who are looking for a specific service or product. By targeting more specific keywords and long-tailed key phrases, you can boost your business with the help of this quality traffic.

How do you find out which keywords will suit your business?

One tool that you can use is Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Using this tool, you can see how often keywords are searched on average and how high the competition is for that keyword. You can also set the location you would like to target to further refine your searches. Using this tool, you can come across some interesting finds. For example, a company that sells shoes may initially think that they should be heavily targeting the keyword “shoes” or “shoe shops”, however, they may find that they competition is too high. Therefore, it would be better to target more specific types of shoes and maybe a location if they are aiming for a local audience.

The company may find that “sports shoes in Norwich” is a better keyword for them. While the search volume will be much lower than simply “shoes”, you can guarantee that most of these searches will be the aforementioned “quality traffic”. The competition will also be much lower, making it easier for the company to rank highly with blog posts and relative Meta tags. By building pages and writing text based on these more specific keyword phrases, the shoe shop will find that it’s not only gaining more traffic to the website, but also gaining more sales from the quality of the traffic.

Be Specific

A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking along the lines of “we want to be at the top of Google for ‘doors’”. With the amount of content on the internet, ranking so highly for such a vague term is basically impossible, this can also lead to lower quality traffic. For example, our door company sells high quality wooden doors, someone who searches for “doors” in a search engine could be looking for plastic doors, they could be looking for spare car doors, and so the keyword “doors” is too vague.

Keyword research will help you to find the keywords that you actually need to be targeting, but keyword research involves more than just finding these keywords. It’s also up to you to think to yourself “what do I want from my website? What type of customer does my business need?” By identifying your ideal customer, you can start doing your keyword research with an end goal in mind.